Hitproto: a tool for the rapid prototyping of haptic interactions for
haptic data visualization

Sabrina Paneels, Jonathan C. Roberts, and Peter J. Rodgers

Abstract

The use of haptic devices is becoming widespread, particularly with their growth in the home-games market and on mobile phones. Likewise, the number of haptic devices and APIs is increasing. However, it is still difficult to program and develop haptic applications. Consequently, there is a need to hide the complexity of programming a haptic application or interactions by providing prototyping tools or frameworks. In particular, one growing application area is haptic data visualization (also called haptification): the use of haptic devices to represent and realize information and data. This paper presents a visual prototyping tool for haptic interactions for data visualization. Users can easily and quickly create haptic interactions through a visual programming interface with tunable parameters. This paper also presents a user evaluation aimed at demonstrating that non-programmers can create simple haptic interactions and which also indicates potential improvements to the tool.